Steve Jobs: 7 Lessons from a Marketing Genius
By Carmine Gallo,
Author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve
Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Apple
CEO Steve Jobs is considered one of the greatest marketers in
corporate history. For more than three decades, he has delivered
legendary keynote presentations, raised product launches to an art
form and successfully communicated the benefits of Apple products to
millions of customers. Whether you're in sales, marketing,
advertising or public relations, Steve Jobs has something to teach
you about telling your brand story.

Plan
in analog. Steve
Jobs may have made a name for himself in the digital world, but he
prepares presentations in the old world of pen and paper. He
brainstorms, sketches and draws on whiteboards. Before a new iPhone,
iPod or MacBook is introduced, the Apple team decides on the exact
messages (aka, benefits) to communicate. Those messages are
consistent across all marketing platforms: presentations, Web sites,
advertisements, press releases, and even the banners than are
unfurled after Jobs' keynote.

Create
Twitter-friendly headlines.
Can you describe your product or service in 140 characters? Steve
Jobs offers a headline, or description, for every product. Each
headline can easily fit in a Twitter post. For example, when he
introduced the MacBook Air in January, 2008, he said that it is
simply, "The world's thinnest notebook." You could visit the
Apple Web site for more information, but if that's all you knew, it
would tell you a lot. If your product description cannot fit in a
Twitter post, keep refining.

Introduce
the antagonist.
In every classic story, the hero fights the villain. The same holds
true for a Steve Jobs presentation. In 1984, the villain was IBM, "Big
Blue." Before he introduced the famous 1984 ad to a group of
Apple salespeople, he created a dramatic story around it. "IBM
wants it all," he said. Apple would be the only company to stand in
its way. It was very dramatic and the crowd went nuts. Branding
expert, Martin Lindstrom, has said that great brands and religions
have something in common: the idea of vanquishing a shared enemy.
Creating a villain allows the audience to rally around the hero -- you,
your ideas and your product.

Stick
to the rule of three.
The human brain can only absorb three or four "chunks" of
information at any one time. Neuroscientists are finding that if you
give your listeners too many pieces of information to retain, they
won't remember a thing. It's uncanny, but every Steve Jobs
presentation is divided into three parts. On September 9, 2009, when
Jobs returned to the world stage after a medical leave of absence, he
told the audience that he had three things to discuss: iPhone, iTunes
and iPods. Jobs even has fun with the rule of three. In January,
2007, he told the audience he had "three revolutionary" products
to introduce -- an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. After
repeating the list several times he said, "Are you getting it?
These are not three separate devices. They are one device and we are
calling it iPhone!"

Strive
for simplicity.
Apple chief design architect, Jonathan Ive, said Apple's products
are easy to use because of the elimination of clutter. The same
philosophy applies to Apple's marketing and sales material. For
example, there are forty words on the average PowerPoint slide. It's
difficult to find ten words in one dozen Apple slides. Most of Steve
Jobs' slides are visuals -- photographs or images. When are there
words, they are astonishingly sparse. For example, in January, 2008,
Jobs was delivering his Macworld keynote and began the presentation
by thanking his customers for making 2007 a successful year for
Apple. The slide behind Jobs simply read "Thank you." Steve Jobs
tells the Apple story. The slides compliment
the
story.

Reveal
a "Holy Smokes" moment.
People will forget what you said, what you did, but they will never
forget how you made them feel. There's always one moment in a Steve
Jobs presentation that is the water cooler moment, the one part of
the presentation that everyone will be talking about. These
show stoppers are completely scripted ahead of time. For example, when
Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, what do people remember? They recall
that he removed the computer from an inter-office envelope. It's
the one moment from Macworld 2008 that everyone who watched it -- and
those who read about -- seem to recall. The image of a computer
sliding in an envelope was immediately unveiled in Apple ads and on
the Apple website. The water cooler moment had run according to plan.

Sell
dreams, not products.
Great leaders cultivate a sense of mission among their employees and
customers. Steve Jobs' mission is to change the world, to put a "dent
in the universe." According to Jobs, "Your work is
going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to do great
work is to love what you do." True evangelists are driven by a
messianic zeal to create new experiences. When he launched the iPod
in 2001, Jobs said, "In our own small way we're going to make the
world a better place." Where most people see the iPod as a music
player, Jobs sees it as tool to enrich people's lives. It's
important to have great products, of course, but passion, enthusiasm
and emotion will set you apart.

Author BioCarmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve
Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, is
a presentation, media-training, and communication-skills coach for the
world's most admired brands. He is an author and columnist for
Businessweek.com and and a keynote speaker and seminar leader who has
appeared on CNBC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC.com, BNET, RedBook, Forbes.com, and
in the
New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Investor's
Business Daily, as
well as many other media outlets. Gallo lives in the San Francisco Bay
area and is a former vice president for a global, top-ten public
relations firm.